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2 Introduction focusing only on macro-level institutions and processes, so conventional IPE has become detached from the real lives of everyday people. Or as one prominent scholar notes,‘Outlining everyday people in everyday places helps us think of international politics [and economics] existing in places International Relations bypasses through fealty to the relations of only a few international actors of ‘‘importance’’–great (state) powers and their regimes, decision-makers, economic zones’(Sylvester 1996: 266–7). The thrust of this book is to reveal not simply everyday actors but, more importantly, the manifold ways in which everyday actions can transform the world economy. As we explainlater, our central purpose is neither to marginalise the importance of the dominant elites nor to reify the agency of the ‘weak’, but rather to analyse the ways in which the weak affect and respond to the dominant and how in the process this interactive relationship generates change in the global economy.

‘Bringing everyday actions in’in this way enables us to open up new angles for ‘doingIPE’. Our task is to produce a sociological framework for IPE–what we call ‘everyday IPE’(EIPE)–which can address existing lacunae in what we call ‘regulatory IPE’(RIPE). Note that this should not be confused with regulation theory. As shall be explained shortly, we characterise the mainstream as ‘regulatory’because the issue of order and the regulation of the world economy occupies centre-stage of the research focus. By contrast, EIPE focuses on transformationinthe worldeconomy that has slipped the gaze and purview of RIPE. This distinction between RIPE and EIPE has …